The-Hindus-An-Alternative-History---Wendy-Doniger

the Ganges Valley for a few centuries, all they had done was add a bit more to what was alreadya very rich mix. The multiplicity characteristic of Hinduism results in part from a kind offusion—a little bit of Ravi Shankar in the night, a Beatle or two—that has been going on formillions of years, as has globalization of a different sort from that which the word generallydenotes. The pieces of the great mosaic of Hinduism were put in place, one by one, by the manypeoples who bequeathed to India something of themselves, planting a little piece of England, orSamarkand, or Africa, in the Punjab or the Deccan.APRÈS MOI, LE DÉLUGEHinduism is so deeply embedded in the land of its birth that we cannot begin tounderstand its history without understanding something of its geography and in particular thehistory of representations of its geography. The central trope for both time and space in India isthe great flood. The myth of the flood is told and retold in a number of variants, some of whichargue for the loss of a great ancient civilization or a fabulous shrine. The telling of a myth ofsuch a flood, building upon a basic story well known throughout India, allows a number ofdifferent places to imagine a glorious lost past of which they can still be proud today.The myth of the flooding of Lemuria, or Dravidia, builds on the traditions of other floods.There is archaeological evidence for the flooding of the Indus Valley cities by the Indus River (c.2000 BCE), as well as for that of the city of Hastinapura by the Ganges, in about 800 BCE. 13There is also textual evidence (in the Mahabharata) for the flooding of the city of Dvaraka, thecity of Krishna, at the westernmost tip of Gujarat, by the Western Ocean (that is, the ArabianSea), 14 in around 950 BCE. (Sources differ; some say 3102 or 1400 BCE.) 15 The appendix to theMahabharata also tells of the emergence of Dvaraka from the ocean in the first place. WhenKrishna chose Dvaraka as the site for his city, he asked the ocean to withdraw from the shore fortwelve leagues to give space for the city; the ocean complied. 16 Since the sea had yielded theland, against nature (like the Netherlands), it would be only fair for it to reclaim it again in theend. Later texts tell of a different sort of bargain: Krishna in a dream told a king to build a templeto him as Jagannatha in Puri, but the ocean kept sweeping the temple away. The great saint Kabirstopped the ocean, which took the form of a Brahmin and asked Kabir for permission to destroythe temple; Kabir refused but let him destroy the temple at Dvaraka in Gujarat. And so he did. 17Even so, some texts insist that the temple of Krishna in Dvaraka was not flooded; the sea was notable to cover it, “even to the present day,” 18 and the temple, able to wash away all evils, remainsthere, 19 just as in the periodic flooding of the universe of doomsday, something always survives.(The physical location of the shrine of Dvaraka, at the very westernmost shore of India, wherethe sun dies every evening, may have inspired the idea that the town was the sacred gate to theworld of the dead. 20 ) In direct contradiction of the Mahabharata’s statement that the entire citywas destroyed, these later texts insist that it is still there. Dvaraka is said to exist today inGujarat, and archaeologists and divers have published reports on what they claim to be itsremains. 21We may also see here the patterns of the myths of both Lemuria (the ocean submergingDvaraka) and Gondwana (Dvaraka emerging from the ocean to join onto Gujarat). Other mythstoo follow in the wake of this one, such as the story that the ocean (called sagara) was firstformed when the sixty thousand sons of a king named Sagara dug into the earth to find the lostsacrificial horse of their father, who was performing a horse sacrifice. 22 (Some versions say thatIndra, the king of the gods, stole the horse.) 23 A sage burned the princes to ashes, and years laterBhagiratha, the great-grandson of Sagara, persuaded the Ganges, which existed at that time only